lemming 17 hours ago | next |

Of course it's a chance to rethink the internet. COVID was also a chance to rethink our responses to pandemics. Cambridge Analytica was a chance to rethink data privacy as it relates to private companies. Edward Snowden was a chance to rethink data privacy as it relates to governments. Climate Change is a chance to rethink how we live our lives, build our cities, and produce our food. In my hometown, an earthquake was a chance to rethink how the city worked.

Life is full of these chances, but we seldom take them. Whatever happens with TikTok, it'll be business as usual in no time.

vaylian 8 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Counterexample: 9/11 (11th september 2001). This changed so many things for the worse. More government surveillance. More security theater. More racism/distrust against people who looks like muslims. And the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have left their traces as well.

hulitu 8 hours ago | root | parent |

> Counterexample: 9/11 (11th september 2001). This changed so many things for the worse.

For the worse ? It was the perfect event to push surveillance and military spendings.

spamizbad 19 hours ago | prev | next |

Interesting trend I've noticed: Tiktok's users tend to like its algorithm, and its probably the app's most valuable assets, but western tech executives tend to hate it and speak of it with derision.

This stands in stark contrast with US-based social media companies, where both its users and content creators often speak like they're at war with the algorithm, yet to the tech elite these sites algorithms are tuned to perfection.

__MatrixMan__ 18 hours ago | root | parent | next |

I'd guess that it comes down to differences between the outcomes that either algorithm is trying to achieve. When westerners advertise they tend to provoke a sense of anxiety and then position the product such that it appears to relieve that anxiety. So we hate "the algorithm" because it's trying to make us uncomfortable without letting us leave. We should hate the algorithm.

I couldn't speak for Tiktok's aims, but they seem different enough that its algorithm doesn't chafe in the ways that we've come to expect.

autoexec 17 hours ago | root | parent |

It seems pretty simple. The Tiktok algorithm is designed to push content you want to see. In the US social media platforms are designed to push content they want you to see and everything you care about gets pushed out of the way. With US platforms you always have to scroll past garbage to get to anything you care about. Tiktok just relentlessly shoves what you want in your face over and over and over again, and when it does misstep it moves on to something else before you even have the chance to consider what you'd rather be doing with your time.

markdown 17 hours ago | root | parent |

> In the US social media platforms are designed to push content they want you to see

Who is they?

Anyway, you're wrong. TikTok pushes videos you want to see, while US app algos push content you are most likely to engage with. These are not the same thing. In fact, content one most engages with is content that generates outrage. Try not to get angry when you open Twitter. It's not easy.

autoexec 17 hours ago | root | parent | next |

> Who is they?

Whoever runs the platform. That's the value they see in their platforms: the ability to control what you see, when you see it, and how you see it. You might only want to see what your friends and family have been up to, and in chronological order, but they are going to make sure you have to constantly scroll past shit you couldn't care less about to get to it, especially when that shit is advertising.

Not only do they do this for marketers, they actually think that making their users regularly disappointed and frustrated is a good thing. They think that forcing you to hunt for what you want makes finding it more rewarding and while you're scrolling past garbage/ads or searching for something you just saw, and cursing the obnoxious algorithm for hiding what you actually want they call it "engagement".

TikTok is also guilty of influencing what you see but they stay out of your way as much as possible. They bombard you with what you came for every minute you spend there. TikTok is massively popular and addictive because of that. US platforms could do that too, but their customers are advertisers - people who want nothing except to take your attention away from what you want to see.

You can go to twitter and get offended by bots, or you can go on TikTok and get bathed in dopamine. There's room enough on the internet for both experiences, but don't be surprised when people feel frustrated and annoyed by one of them and not the other.

__MatrixMan__ 15 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Well yeah, you've got to stay angry at the right people at all times. As long as 49.9% of us are preoccupied with hating the other 49.9% of us, it's nice and cheap for the 0.02% to run the show. That's the social media value prop: division as a service.

jorvi 9 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> Anyway, you're wrong. TikTok pushes videos you want to see, while US app algos push content you are most likely to engage with.

No. US apps push creators, TikTok pushes content.

On TikTok, its the content that goes viral. Some nobody with 700 followers can have a video explode. That is exceedingly rare on YouTube. Its usually the channels with 1 million subscribers.

Advertisers love that, and so do platform owners. Its much easier to control and squeeze a few creators rather than a big diffuse group.

ryanschaefer 8 hours ago | root | parent |

> Advertisers love that, and so do platform owners. Its much easier to control and squeeze a few creators rather than a big diffuse group.

There’s most likely some middle ground for this. Too diffuse and it makes direct sponsorship difficult meaning the platform has more control over advertisements as they need to be algorithmically placed. Too centralized and you’re back in the land of cable where your advertising is less effective because of the broad cross section of the audience watching.

As far as “squeezing” creators goes… no, more centralized means higher demand which means higher pay and more control in creators hands.

rayiner 17 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The Tik Tok algorithm is great. It feeds me compelling stuff instead of trying to piss me off like Facebook.

glimshe 9 hours ago | root | parent | next |

I must be immune to their algorithm because, even with an account, multiple searches and 1 hour of use, I didn't get a single video I wanted to watch. YouTube works way better for me. I might simply not like short form content.

therealpygon 8 hours ago | root | parent | next |

What you really said was “the algorithm I have been feeding data into for years performed batter than the one I used for an hour.” Shocking.

glimshe 8 hours ago | root | parent |

I didn't get an interesting video even with the search function. I just couldn't find compelling content on tiktok for my interests.

Also, 1 hour without an interesting video is something I've never experienced on YouTube, even on new accounts (I create an account for new TVs). I think I'm simply not their target audience.

I couldn't even understand the point of 10-20% of the videos, like "What is this video trying to show here? A random person saying the word banana in a loop"

Vampiero 9 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

I mean 50% of TikTok is brain rot and 50% is normies doing normie stuff. If you're someone who saw the old Internet I doubt you'd give a shit about TikTok. It feels like a betrayal of what the Internet could have been

spamizbad 6 hours ago | root | parent |

What do you consider the “old internet”? Because I find older Zoomers and millennials have different ideas of what that means

Vampiero 2 hours ago | root | parent |

I mean the pre-smartphone era when there was a barrier to entry on the internet. It was a nice place. Then everything turned to shit, as it always does, when the ignorant masses caused a context collapse by diluting the previous subcultures into a homogeneous blob that is eager to get spied upon and to be served advertisements non-stop.

The point of no return was precisely the introduction of the smartphone because it lowered the amount of energy necessary for someone who doesn't care about technology to interact meaningfully with it. To this day most people don't own a personal computer unless they need it for work. But almost everyone has a phone.

subarctic 16 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

People who use tiktok tell me it gets better when you have an account. All I know is whenever someone sends me a video it always tries to show the most emotionally charged stuff (e.g. war footage) right after. Now it's even showing pictures of Trump when you pause the video

chenzhekl 18 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

No, I don’t think Meta hates such algorithms. It just couldn’t beat TikTok algorithm-wise.

Liquix 17 hours ago | root | parent |

i think they could if they started with "show users content they like" instead of "keep users staring at the app for as long as possible". both result in more engagement and more ad dollars, but optimizing for the latter becomes a race to the bottom with increasingly extreme, polarizing, emotion-inducing content.

the blatant algorithm manipulation around elections and politics is just the icing on the cake. sure, china is probably doing this too, but they're either being more subtle or playing a longer game. meta et al may have come out ahead for a few quarters but what's that worth if user count is declining long term?

bsenftner 10 hours ago | root | parent |

It's pretty simple, the Tiktok algorithm recognizes the value of long term user satisfaction of it's users, and all the American Tech Algorithms are blind to anything long term, and plus the "user" is not the customer in the American tech product, the advertiser is, American social media is a product for the advertisers and not for the users. This is clear as day.

troupo 10 hours ago | root | parent |

TikTok's algorithm is also nearly instant.

From time to time it will show you content adjacent to what you watch. After three or so viewings your feed will add the content you watched/engaged with regularly.

Press "not interested" twice (or sometimes once), and content will disappear.

American social media effectively ignores any input from users.

bdangubic 10 hours ago | root | parent |

so much this. tiktok can easily be trained to provide you pretty much exact content you desire from it while no other social media platform (is willing) can do the same

d0100 8 hours ago | root | parent |

> no other social media platform (is willing) can do the same

Are we sure? My experience with Instagram is the opposite, whenever you linger a bit on a reel you'll start to get more of that content

It's a pain because you have to constantly press "not interested" to curate your feed, I'd pretty much prefer to have content feeds, so that I can watch anything without having it go in my (im)permanent record

BeetleB 17 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I don't use any of these services, but it's interesting seeing your comment and some of the replies.

Just this past week I met a friend who uses TikTok and he said the same: Really good algorithm. He said when he watches "intelligent" stuff in it, the recommendations tend to be as "intelligent" or even more so. Whereas his experience with Instagram was that it quickly starts suggesting brain dead content.

bsenftner 10 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The "western tech executive" is a propaganda mouth piece. This entire situation is reeks of political manipulation and dishonest voices from every single media pundit. Tiktok is merely a break in the wall to wall American Media Nonsense, and the proponents of the continual American Gaslight don't like a break in their manipulations.

xnx 18 hours ago | prev | next |

RSS was too good and too decentralized to exist. It's a miracle that it's still possible to independently publish and subscribe to podcasts (notably, Spotify doesn't let you subscribe to unapproved podcasts).

I social web based on RSS would be heaven: publish anywhere you want, own your content and URL, no content moderation, pick your own service (separately) for discovery. Google should be pushing harder for this to bust content back out of the walled gardens of Instagram.

ikesau 18 hours ago | root | parent | next |

I think this is the direction ActivityPub is headed.

You can already add .rss to the end of someone's Mastodon account to get their posts as a feed (e.g. https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic.rss) and ghost.org is working on their AP integration for longer form content (more info about the beta here https://activitypub.ghost.org/)

I think PeerTube has RSS support too, but I've not experimented with it.

arch_deluxe 18 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I totally agree. Is there a community of like-minded folks out there somewhere? I'd love to see someone give this a try.

xnx 18 hours ago | root | parent |

The US is trying its best by kicking 170 million users out of their prefered app. Amazing that I haven't seen more effort to pick up the refugees. Twitter could've made a big video push. Tumblr (I know photomatt is a little distracted now) could've reminded the world it exists. etc.

Animats 17 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

RSS can distribute a feed, but that's all it does. There's no discovery or search or ranking.

oefrha 16 hours ago | root | parent | next |

People who chant RSS seem to never get this. Publishing is trivial, search and discovery is all that matters, saying “pick your own service (separately) for discovery” is like saying write down int main(), now write down the rest of the program and you’re done. What the hell is that service? That’s 99% of the work.

In addition, only discovering feeds (followed by chronological aggregation of said feeds) is crude and outdated. Anyone who has subscribed to hundreds of feeds can probably tell you how great the signal to noise ratio is. It’s not. And that’s just for subscribing to blogs that tend to be on topic, throw in microblogs (Twitter and clones) and you quickly get all kinds of nonsense you don’t care about, e.g. baseball and politics if you follow John Gruber for Apple news. Realistically there are a small handful of really high quality feeds you don’t want to miss, and for the rest you want to follow topics, not people. TikTok lets you effortlessly do that; traditional RSS subscription model doesn’t, and no one has built that “your own service for discovery”. Ironically Reddit may be the closest thing for the following topics part, if you ignore all its problems.

There was an article on HN a couple years ago that goes into more details: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...

rickydroll 9 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

For me, discovery is independent of consumption. With my RSS feed, I read what I've subscribed to, and then when I say, “I'm bored,” that's when I want to discover. Otherwise don't distract me

xnx 17 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

That's even better. Disaggregate those functions into separate services. Don't like "the algorithm", pick a different one.

theamk 18 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Meh, I remember time when blogs I read moved from LiveJournal to RSS, and discoverability went way down.

In LJ, if you liked someone's post, you could click on "friends" and see _their_ feed. I've discovered a lot of new blogs this way. There was even "all friends of all friends" page if you really wanted a firehose.

In RSS world, all of this is gone. Sure, one blog I read had a separate "posts I found interesting" feed, and I've discovered some new feeds this way.. but this was only one site, most of the websites had nothing like this.

oneeyedpigeon 10 hours ago | prev | next |

> When I went to school, I was taught that free will is the distinguishing characteristic of the human species

Hugely off-topic, but that strikes me as a very strange thing to be taught. Personally, I believe that, if humans have free will, other animals do too, but that's all it is: a belief.

xyzzy9563 10 hours ago | root | parent |

Biologically humans are just animals with more powerful brains. Why do some people think we alone have novel things such as free will?

ghssds 9 hours ago | root | parent |

This is what Christians teach. God made us in His image and put us on Earth so we can dominate it, including all living creatures. He gave us Free Will because He loves us, but will punish anyone who use it, because we should submit to Him. This more or less is what my Catholic school was teaching anyway.

whoitwas 9 hours ago | prev | next |

The owners of Tiktok banned it in the US by not selling off or offering protection for American data. Anyone that thinks giving a hostile nation access to more than 100 million sensor arrays in their country is not thinking well.

331c8c71 8 hours ago | prev | next |

Given that a lot of people have multiple interests and consumption patterns I wonder why the platforms like YouTube (the only one I use) do not give user a conscious choice? For instance, I watch educational content, music-related content and some talk shows. Yt can figure out this out (clustering) and let me choose what i want to focus in a given moment.

diggan 8 hours ago | root | parent |

All these platforms aren't build for users who want to make choices. They're all built for the lowest common denominator, namely a user who opens a app, uses it for 30-120 minutes then close it, and don't really mind much what they're consuming. These users are not out after learning something necessarily, but just pass time watching something. The higher up you put something, the more likely they're to watch it.

331c8c71 7 hours ago | root | parent |

You think promoting a minimal level of agency for consumers would drive engagement and revenues down? One could use such "user care" for marketing as well.

I have been wondering quite a while how engineers working explicitly on "lowest common denominator" tech feel about themselves and their work?

EDIT: I kind of forgot that yt serves ads in unbearable quantities for quite a while. Thinking that yt might care for viewers seems indeed a bit naive.

seydor 10 hours ago | prev | next |

What makes people think that people don't like addictions? They jump from one to the other all the time

tappaseater 8 hours ago | prev | next |

The TT creator, John Aravosis, said recently on his show that it took TT 3 days to figure out he is gay and he said he never interacted with it in any way that would convey that. On the other hand, it kept giving me animal snuff that utterly revulsed me, despite my reporting it, thumbs downing.

I deleted my account about a year ago. Although I loved a lot of content and was awed by the work of many creators, I got this weird anxiety when I had been scrolling for, say, an hour. It was like my brain was giving me a warning sign, though my consciousness did not perceive it. I came to a personal decision, unscientifically, and without any jingoism or conspiracies, that short-form scrolling is bad for my health.

A couple of weeks ago I signed up for Loops (the fediverse version of TT) and I scrolled a few videos. I had such a strong negative feeling that I closed it and uninstalled. I am so happy YouTube Shorts is so shit, because I watch one or two that catch my eye, then go back to the longer videos.

tormeh 8 hours ago | root | parent |

Afaict TT only cares about dwell time and maybe if you comment or something. These dislike buttons do nothing. In fact, since they increase dwell time using them makes it more likely for such content to reappear in your feed than if you simply scrolled.

BSDobelix 9 hours ago | prev | next |

>rethink the whole internet?

The IP protocol has been proven for decades, but the "newyorker" is probably thinking about the entire Internet of Facebook, Google, Instagram and X?

diggan 9 hours ago | prev | next |

The article is not about alternatives to social media giants, but rather about a billionaire who wants to "rescue" TikTok.

> McCourt, who says that he has no interest in becoming TikTok’s C.E.O., is unique among the group of potential buyers. For starters, he has been steadfastly public, voicing his desire to purchase the app in print and televised interviews, including on “Fox & Friends,” reportedly Trump’s favorite show. He is also the only potential buyer so far promising to serve the public’s interest—to address not only geopolitical concerns about the app but also the deleterious effects it has been shown to have on young users.

It seems to be little more than a thinly veiled ad for billionaire Frank McCourt to push his bid to buy TikTok, which he promises will not just be another social media platform but so much better under his ownership, and fix all the problems. Surely wouldn't be used to push his and his friends' agenda. Not to mention that ByteDance seems to have repeatably said they don't want to sell, but everyone seems to have their price, maybe they just haven't got the right offer yet.

al2o3cr 20 hours ago | prev | next |

If your idea of "rethinking" is to have a slightly different set of billionaires that control everything, you'll love this article

SllX 18 hours ago | root | parent | next |

It’s a New Yorker article. Even if the ideas were sound, it wouldn’t be lovable. At least this one doesn’t begin with “Webster’s says…” but it does appear to be a puff piece courtesy of The Submarine[1] McCourt is using to try and drum up support for its TikTok bid.

Fortunately we don’t have to indulge them as the project founder’s page is here: https://www.mccourt.com/project-liberty/ and the project website is here: https://www.projectliberty.io/

New tech isn’t the solution to what ails the web though. The web is built on great tech, and there’s a constant forward motion to iterate and improve on the technical stack of the web. Reigning in specific anti-consumer practices characteristic of surveillance-oriented businesses is because even if you manage to make a decentralized protocol popular for a short period of time, if there is ever enough people for it to be commercially lucrative, exactly the same cycle of centralization will repeat itself.

[1]: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

deadbabe 9 hours ago | prev | next |

We can rethink the internet, but people wouldn’t like the answer, so let’s not. Just carry on, carry on.

thrance 8 hours ago | prev | next |

tl;dr: another billionaire wants to buy TikTok.

Oligarchs won't stop until all media (social and legacy) are turned into ideological echo chambers in favor of laissez-faire capitalism and a return to the Gilded Age.

All done in the name of free speech and freedom, of course.

hereme888 10 hours ago | prev | next |

Can we get over the nonsense that banning tiktok has anything to do with free speech?

Companies get shut down or penalized whenever they break laws or behave in obviously abusive ways. Tiktok was given several recourses, and they refused.

That's all there is to it.

ANewFormation 9 hours ago | root | parent |

Which recourses are you talking about? It was mostly a classic witch hunt in that they were charged without evidence, presumed guilty, and then told to prove that they were not a witch.

It's a tried and true method to find witches.

wileydragonfly 17 hours ago | prev |

Tik tok seemed to push a lot of obviously mildly retarded or fetal alcohol syndrome people at me. Felt like it was normalizing things we shouldn’t aspire to.